The news that a well-known writer for CNN and Times Magazine was confronted by another news source for plagiarizing someone else’s content has been an important topic of conversation amongst bloggers and journalists within the last several weeks. You can look at an article about his apology here and what he did.
Mass Quantities of Information
These days I am seeing people consuming mass quantities of information and the writers of blogs, newspapers, and digital newspaper as the people who are trying to entertain the masses with whatever they can find and trying to be the first at it exposing anything that will bring more traffic. We also see how companies approve controversial content for the sake of traffic, comments, and a little notoriety for the employee; this lets the company know that they are moving the masses even if the content can be hurtful to a large group or community of people already in the spotlight.
Writing controversial content for your business blog can backfire on you and the company. It can provoke a swarm of bees at any moment that will sting and hurt your company’s efforts, have your current customers leave you, and persuade possible clients to go to your competitors.
How does one come up with new, fresh, and original content for your blog without looking towards pre-written content on the web about the same subject?
Writing is a Team Effort at CIMA
At CIMA writing becomes a team effort. I might bounce off an idea to Raul and we might have the same ideas or different ones. We write out drafts, have the other person edit, and ask to provide more detail than what was originally written. One of the most fun exercises we did was putting together this post about original content and comparing that to homemade onion rings for Raul’s blog .
We also make sure that we credit other writers and even clients if we need to use them as an example in our posts. Running multiple blogs can be challenging especially when the CIMA team is committed to writing fresh, original content all of the time.
On few occasions we summarize an already written post or provide our perspective on a current event on our blogs. One of our most highly viewed posts for PapaHeroes was written because of news about a tragic shooting in Puerto Rico just minutes after celebrating the New Year this year. I saw a picture of the parent slumped over in a chair waiting outside his daughter’s room in one of the local digital newspapers. I wrote about how I would feel as a parent if something that tragic happened to me. Unbeknownst to us, that same day the parents decided to stop all medical interventions and their daughter died. Raul noticed a spike in visitors on the parenting blog and people were looking for information about the girl from all over the globe. Till this day, people still search for information on the young girl and the tragic event that took her life.
We know that the more content we write, the chances of us landing a client are greater than if we just sit and wait for someone to call for our services. Last year we landed a new client because of the content we wrote and we showed our ability to resolve a potential clients’ issues. We wrote about an alternative to open tables reservations system for a former client who was in the restaurant business.
The content did several things for the person reading it and searching for information online.
- It showed CIMA IT had an expertise in working with restaurants.
- We used our established client as a concrete example of how they were successful at using the tool we created for them.
- Solved an issue he was having for his twenty restaurants and their reservation system.
We spoke to the client about what he needed in more detail once he contacted us and since then we have been able to resolve other issues for him. As a small company, writing original content for the business blog continuously opens the door for new clients. Plagiarizing someone else’s content won’t show your expertise. It will set you and your business up for failure if you can’t deliver what you wrote about or promised in the article.
In our next post we will write about the tools we use to come up with content in order to show our expertise, highlight the work we have done for clients, and build our company portfolio.